Intelligibility and English as a Lingua Franca

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As an English teacher at a university in Japan, for a long time I assumed that teaching a native speaker variety of English would best ensure mutually intelligible pronunciation among my students and the people with whom they would interact. I found that this was not true though, and I tried different pronunciation syllabi in an effort to rectify this. However, even the Lingua Franca Core syllabi was not helping intelligibility either. After a second failure, I decided to investigate what pronunciation problems my students were having myself, and this paper is part of that project.

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